Stunning picture shows dead star racing away from a massive explosion

Need a kick-start? You would be hard-pressed to find one more powerful than a supernova – a sudden explosion in which a dying star ejects most of its mass. That is what happened to the pulsar pictured here, sending it racing away from its home with a tail of particles and magnetic energy stretching behind it for 13 light years. In the image above, the star is at the left end of the yellow tail and is heading away from the big bubble.

“It’s very rare for a pulsar to get enough of a kick for us to see this,” said Frank Schinzel, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia, in a statement. He and his colleagues observed the pulsar – an extremely dense corpse of a star – with a radio telescope in New Mexico called the Very Large Array, and reported their results at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in California.

The pulsar is known as PSR J0002+6216 and is located 6500 light years from Earth. It is speeding away from the supernova at more than 1100 kilometres per second – much faster than most pulsars, which average about 240 kilometres per second, and enough to let it escape the Milky Way.

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The expanding debris initially outpaced the pulsar, but slowed as it met up with dust and gas in the surrounding space. After 5000 years, the pulsar caught up with edge of the supernova remnant and busted free. It has been another 5000 years since then, and the pulsar is now 53 light years away from the centre of the remnant.